Unoriginal selection ... Richard Wentworth, one of the shortlisted artists, with his proposal for Darwin's Canopy. Photograph: Martin Godwin

Some very strange mammals are currently on display at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. They sleepwalk and stumble through the task they have been allotted, barely aware, it appears, of their surroundings. Their brains, you have to conclude, are so much smaller than their inflated reputations that these unappealing beasts will soon be extinct. If Darwin's theory is true and only the fittest survive, we are surely witnessing some of evolution's losers.

The winner, Tania Kovats, has already been chosen. But it has to be said the judges' task must have been dispiriting. This commission was a great chance for artists to engage with the most important idea of the last two centuries, to find ways of illustrating - and championing - the theory of evolution at a time when irrational religious forces menace Darwin's common sense revolution. What a chance for art to show it can engage with science, and also wade into a fierce debate!

The artists have run a mile from any such challenge. Few address evolution at all. Mark Wallinger just submits a piece about the dictionary. Christine Borland comes up with a Frankensteinian image that has nothing specifically to say about Darwin and no positive feelings towards science. Dorothy Cross proposes to put a gothic foetal sculpture inside a glass column.

One proposal, which does look as if the artist at least visited the museum, is Rachel Whiteread's relief of animal and human feet walking across the ceiling, cast from life and resembling the early human footprints found in mud pools in caves. But as a modern riposte to the wondrous Victorian terracotta portrayals of animals that so imaginatively cover this great 19th-century building it is oddly complacent.

There is a need for modesty here. The Natural History Museum is an architectural and artistic treasure, that finds ways to communicate the richness and underlying order of nature through gargoyles and romanesque grandeur. Yet the view of nature it reflects - that of its founder Richard Owen - is anti-evolutionary. Darwin's Canopy is therefore a nice idea. The proposal chosen, by Kovats, is a respectful homage to Darwin's own drawing of the tree of evolution. But the exhibition is a dismal insight into the total lack of interest in science displayed by most contemporary British artists. I guess Art still isn't an A-level you combine with biology or physics.